Bookslut

December 22, 2011

The sun’s gestures are precise at this time of year. When it eventually rises above the hill it shines directly through our small kitchen window. A beam crosses the table and illuminates the hall beyond. In barely an hour, though, the sun sinks again below the hill, south-south-west, leaving a couple of hours of dwindling half-light. Everything we imagine doing, this time of year, we imagine doing in the dark.

Happy solstice, everyone. Tomorrow I'm flying across the Atlantic, so I'll bid you all farewell for now. And I'll be back post-Christmas.

December 20, 2011

You can, if you are me, spend a lot of time studying maps and looking at how much the European borders have changed through the centuries. But Frank Jacobs notes that the more things change etc etc. Borders have a tendency to reassert themselves, and he uses the "zombie border" between East and West Germany -- a border that was basically a retracing of medieval borders -- to explain why that is.

Prussia was seen as the cradle of German militarism, as in caricatures of spiked-helmeted, goose-stepping soldiers. It did owe its rise and its eventual domination of the new Germany Empire [created in 1871] to the victories over the Austrians and the French under Bismarck and, earlier, to Frederick the Great—although Frederick’s opportunistic aggression was no worse than that of Louis XIV or Napoleon. The Prussian army certainly was very large in proportion to Prussia’s population. In pre-1914 Imperial Germany, the army had obvious presence and influence. Foreign visitors to Berlin noticed how the streets were full of men in uniform.

Before Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, her husband wrote a complementary, if less successful, novel that drew on similar themes. St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian, A Romance turns two hundred years old this year, and Stefany Anne Golberg uses the occasion to revisit the book.

"His essays, lectures, and prison letters from the last quarter century are, taken altogether, among the most vivid, sustained, and searching explorations of the moral and political responsibility of the intellectual produced anywhere in Europe," wrote Timothy Garton Ash, the foremost chronicler of revolutionary Central Europe, in his 1999 collection History of the Present. "Indeed, it is difficult to think of any figure in the contemporary world who has more cumulative authority to speak on this issue than Vaclav Havel."

December 19, 2011

In an interview at Truth Out, Judith Butler wonders why people say they can't figure out what the Occupy Wall Street protesters want. She has figured it out, but perhaps the message is a little too large for media commentators:

Well, let me say this: I think there is a demand. The demand is for a radical economic and political restructuring of the world.

It feels weird to grieve for a politician, doesn't it? We're way past a time when we could believe good things about our leaders. Even the most productive or idealistic are necessarily sleazy and disappointing. We all now know too much about Kennedy, let alone anyone fucking up our country now. But Havel was a writer first, and it is still possible to grieve for writers. I wrote about Havel not too long ago for the Smart Set.

December 16, 2011

Razan Ghazzawi, a 31-year-old Syrian blogger, was arrested and charged with “trying to incite sectarian strife” earlier this week, which could result in a 15-year prison sentence for the U.S.-born writer.

Christopher Hitchens, a slashing polemicist in the tradition of Thomas Paine and George Orwell who trained his sights on targets as various as Henry Kissinger, the British monarchy and Mother Teresa, wrote a best-seller attacking religious belief, and dismayed his former comrades on the left by enthusiastically supporting the American-led war in Iraq, died Thursday at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. He was 62.

December 15, 2011

I have been trying to find a link to kittens reading books or curled up in books or a goat eating a book, something on that level for you, but instead I have all the bad news below and now babies being cut out of pregnant women's bodies in Guatemala to sell on the international adoption black market. I know!

Yes, but the principle of rationality, which has its place in the economy, has increasingly permeated our thinking, finding its way into living rooms, schools and social relationships. This application of economic principles to the valuation of human beings is inhumane.

A group in Jerusalem going by the name Sikrikim -- "a name chosen in honor of an honorless group of Jewish terrorists from the Roman era who killed so many of their own they were chased out of Jerusalem before the Roman siege ever began" -- attacked a local bookstore for promoting immodesty. By selling books in English. Shalom Auslander reports on the attack for The Jewish Week.

And so, over the past 20 months, these soldiers of the Lord Our God, God of Abraham, Isaac and Yaakov, relentlessly terrorized and vandalized Manny’s (www.mannysbookstore.com), shattering the store windows as God had commanded them, flinging soiled diapers into the shop in the manner which the Lord did show us and, in order to find favor in the eyes of Hashem, smearing the store with feces and excrement. In all, they caused 250,000 shekels (about $60,000) worth of damage to the store, and last month, the store fell. They capitulated. Victory, again, for the zealots.

"I can't stand THE DEPRESSED. It's like a job, it's the only thing they work hard at. Oh good my depression is very well today. Oh good today I have another mysterious symptom and I will have another one tomorrow. The DEPRESSED are full of hate and bile and when they are not having panic attacks they are writing poems. What do they want their poems to DO? Their depression is the most VITAL thing about them. Their poems are threats. ALWAYS threats. There is no sensation that is keener or more active than their pain. It's just another utility. Like electricity and water and gas and democracy. They could not survive without it. GOD, I'M SO THIRSTY, WHERE'S THE WAITER?"

It was impossible not to warm to someone who replied to an actress claiming that since she had the most beautiful body and he the most brilliant mind they should produce a child of genius: "But what if the child inherits my body – and your brain?"

I just really want everyone's mother issues out on the surface before you all travel home and see her face to face. Nothing bad could ever come of that. In my continuing quest, I talk to Barbara Almond at this week's Kirkus Q&A about her book The Monster Within: The Hidden Side of Motherhood. (Her book showed up in this week's Smart Set column.) We discuss social expectations for mothers, why ambivalence about her child is not a horrible thing for a mother to have, and how it would be best if we could somehow physically resurrect Winnicott. (There is a contemporary zombie novel no one has thought of.) But really, Winnicott is the best. You might want to take a selection of his work home with you as self-soothing.

There are certainly powerful biological and psychological roots to maternal love. Women who have planned to give a baby up for adoption often change their mind as soon as they take their first glance at their newborn. But not every woman reacts this positively and instantly. And certainly the strains of child-rearing, and the inevitable clash between the infant's needs and some of the mother's needs, produces negative feelings.

A mixture of feelings is inevitable and a culture that denies this, as ours does to a large degree, does women no favors. Women have a much easier time recovering from their negative feelings when they are cut a little slack by society. However, It should be added that women themselves cultivate a lot of the competitive maternal perfectionism that characterizes so much of middle- and upper-class parenting.

Speaking of the Smart Set, my latest column is up, all about mothering! Let's talk about motherhood! Because no one ever does that, ever. The piece came out of the biography Dangerous Ambition: Dorothy Thompson and Rebecca West -- and I should state right now that I actually like that book a lot. But it had this odd twist that I couldn't help noticing; Susan Hertog couldn't keep herself from letting it show how much she judged both writers for being failures as mothers and wives.

The New Woman drank, she smoked, she wore her skirt a little shorter and she had sex before marriage. But most important, the New Woman worked.

Now, New Women had an awful habit of becoming Old Women as soon as they found themselves married or knocked up. The birth of the New Woman — exciting, edgy, urban — was timed perfectly with the birth of the suburb, as women tired of all of their new freedoms and fled to the outskirts to nest with their families. A few stubbornly held onto their careers, and two of those women were West and Thompson. West infiltrated the London literary scene as a critic with a bluestocking vibrancy, and Thompson traveled the tumultuous post-World War I Europe as a foreign correspondent. Both longed for love, but both were acutely aware that a person gives up something in order to get married. Even if you are the blissful bride, radiating an aura of love and joy, you are sacrificing something at that altar. Thompson classified that something as, “I'll never take risks in the same way. I'll never start off across the world with nothing in my pocket again, and be able to say, 'well, it's my own life, isn't it?'" She was conflicted, but she married. She may have regretted it.

A while back I wrote a column about being a dead ringer for Cosima Wagner, a tricky lady. Particularly in this photo. Today I read the entry in Cosima's diary that refers to that photograph: "Told R that we should have ourselves photographed, I kneeling before him, for this is my rightful position - it would be a family heirloom." Jesus Christ, Cosima.

(A friend at lunch today asked me, "Are you done with Frau Wagner yet?" I think meaning, will you stop bringing her up in conversation? I answered with a question: Can anyone ever be said to be done with Frau Wagner? But really, I should stop bringing her up in conversation.)

December 12, 2011

“Millions would die in the first week alone.”

Newt Gingrich would like you to know, through science fiction novels and speeches, that someone is probably going to detonate a nuclear warhead in outer space above the United States, which will recreate The Road in live action America. This is definitely going to happen, but don't worry! He totally has a plan.

Fairy tales are very different from Henry James or Virginia Woolf or Proust - they don't have specificity. This literature of enchantment presents the possibility that people are not consistent within themselves and that all kinds of unpredictable events will take place in someone's life that will make them behave out of character.

He always said Barcelona was one of the greatest experiments in world history, because what we discovered there was that white-collar workers don’t actually do anything. In Barcelona their idea of having a revolution was to get rid of all the managers and just carry on without them. And nothing really changed.

It is precisely this urbane jadedness that makes Labels so entertaining, whether its author is condemning the architecture of the Sphinx (“an ill-proportioned composition of inconsiderable aesthetic appeal”), the interior of Hagia Sophia (“a majestic shell full of vile Turkish fripperies”) or the dubious majesty of Etna at sunset (“Nothing I have ever seen in Art or Nature was quite so revolting”). Volcanoes are a particular source of the author’s contempt, as is the “unremitting avarice of the Egyptian race” and the inhabitants of Naples, on whose shores he is reminded of the “admirable phrase” of Baedeker, “always extortionate and often abusive”.

I am thoroughly enjoying Eugene Hynes's Knock: The Virgin's Apparition in 19th Century Ireland. And it's so seasonal! Although I keep forgetting it's about to be Christmas, as there is not the relentless creepy carols sung by creepy children's choirs blaring at every grocery store and shopping center. (Talking on the phone with a friend last night, he was walking through a strip mall and I could hear the insistent trill of the Sugar Plum Fairy loud and clear. It was the first dose of Christmas I had gotten in a while.)

Anyway! What were we talking about? This wonderful book. Hynes has laid an extensive foundation to explain and support his theory that Irish peasants were not a bunch of wackos. And I particularly enjoyed this section:

In a critique of the way American history is presented in US school textbooks, James Loewen made a point that has broader application. He quotes from one typical text's description of the religion of the continent's original peoples:

"These Native Americans [in the south-west] believed that nature was filled with spirits. Each form of life, such as plants and animals, had a spirit. Earth and air held spirits, too. People were never alone. They shared their lives with the spirits of nature."

While the account tries to show respect, Loewen argues that it reduces the believers to simple-minded caricatures. Their beliefs are presented as childish make-believe. A similarly literal version of Christianity would offend believers:

"These Americans believed that one great male god ruled the world... They ate crackers and wine or grape juice, believing that they were eating their [god's] son's body and drinking his blood. If they believed strongly enough, they would live on forever after they died."

Loewen points out that textbooks never describe Christianity this way. The reason is not hard to find: believers would immediately recognise that such literalism fails to convey either the symbolic meaning or the spiritual satisfaction of sharing in the beliefs and practices of a religious community. Rather than reducing their faith to a listing of the bizarre and the irrational, researchers need to pay as much respectful and sympathetic attention to the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of the underdogs of the world as they do to those of the orthodox elites and the powerfully established.

In 1989, he responded to Malcolm's portrayal of him as an unethical creature in an epilogue to the book that started the whole thing, Fatal Vision. He's now posted that epilogue online, in case you wanted to read it without buying some true crime book.

Jenny Turner has a surprisingly thoughtful essay about the muddled mess that contemporary feminism has become. I say "surprisingly" not because of the author -- Jenny Turner is nothing but wit and grace and intelligence incarnate from what I have read -- but because normally when someone approaches this topic it's with a blow torch and a table saw. Turner's piece is worth your time.

‘Enough ink has been spilled in quarrelling over feminism … perhaps we should say no more about it’: Simone de Beauvoir, at the very beginning of The Second Sex (1949). ‘The subject is irritating, especially to women.’ Long before they were shouting ‘Ban the Bunny’ and dressing up as butchers, feminists were annoying people, not just misogynists and sexists, but the very people you’d think would like them best.

I’m interested in the ordinary people of history. One of the things I try to do when I write is to dignify them by showing a bit of interest in their lives and what happened to them, rather than treating them as if they’re another disposable number, which is how, quite often, they were treated in life.

I am not one who particularly aches to listen to a panel of writers discuss issues for an hour, but Marina Warner and Richard Dawkins were on the same panel show, and there's only a 1 minute 40 second clip online? (Anyone know where I can find the rest of this?) When a new, massive Warner book showed up recently, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights I had to muffle my girlish, geeky shriek of joy.

Anyway, here she is, for one minute and 40 seconds, explaining to Richard Dawkins why myths and stories are important to people.

The Smithsonian offers up a brief history of stigmata, if you're into that sort of thing. I'm currently reading Sergio Luzzatto's investigation into the recently beatified Italian, Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age. (Pio is included in the Smithsonian article.) My favorite bit of information so far was that Pio wrote a series of letters about his experiences with religious ecstasy... except he plagiarized them in full from the writings of another stigmatic.

Maybe QR Markham should not feel so bad? His book was yanked, his series of novels cancelled, but he's probably going to get a book deal so he can write about how bad he feels -- because that is how this disgusting industry works sometimes -- and apparently sainthood isn't off the table just yet. It'll just take a little spontaneous bleeding.

They're turning Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca into a musical, I don't know if you have heard. It is going to be pretty awful. (Reading about it on a German news site is not helping. "Rebecca: DAS MUSICAL" doesn't sound any better.

And just in case you were wondering what in the world the songs were going to be about (oh my god, there are white top hats involved. On the ladies.), here is a collaboration, not musical-affiliated from what I can tell, of a song inspired by Rebecca. It is awful enough that it might as well be affiliated. Oh, Daphne. You were so wicked and now they are putting white satin top hats on your characters. It's an unfair fate.

[There was] a mid-1990s study of creative groups which found that only one of fifty writers (Maupassant) was free of psychopathology, and that this group contained the highest proportion of individuals with severe pathology (nearly 50 per cent) compared with scientists, statesmen, thinkers, artists and composers.

I was raised Catholic, and one of the things I was taught was that there are no sins that we are not capable of. I don’t know if that’s true, but I can imagine circumstances where I am capable of most sins. When bad things happen to people, it doesn’t make them better people, it makes them the victim of bad events. Maybe some of them make choices that make them better people. But I am often irritable if I get in my car and I’m supposed to be somewhere in 20 minutes, but I realize I have to stop for gas which will make me late. I can see where my behavior might actually get worse.

Look, no one is more upset that Arthur Koestler turns out to be a really good writer than me. I am teaching Koestler in my upcoming class about bad people who write great literature at Drexel University. And he is a bad person. We'll not detail his sins right this second, but if you wanted to Google "Arthur Koestler Rapist" you'd get caught up pretty quickly.

I figured I should read more by him than the usual Darkness at Noon, and I had a copy of Dialogue with Death: The Journal of a Prisoner of the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. It turns out it is good. Really good. And not just good in the distant sense of oh, that's a nice sentence, or this passage is particularly good. But in a I cannot stop reading it even after I've run out of hot water and my bathtub is quickly cooling on me. In a, I am actually rooting for him kind of way. God damn it! I am going to have to rewrite my Koestler lecture now.

December 5, 2011

'Now hear this" – the three words that Christopher Logue, who has died aged 85, used to open his epic poem War Music were aptly chosen. In this stark modern rendition of The Iliad, Homer's ancient Greek account of the siege of Troy, the invocation to the muse commands the listener's attention with the insistence born of first-hand experience of military life.

Starting off with an interview with the divine Lore Segal. Have you read Lucinella? There is no good reason why you haven't already. At any rate, Segal is a formidable writer, and she dishes on her long career to Drew Johnson. We also have interviews with Alvin Orloff about sex and God and why the Cathars should make a comeback right about now, and Luis Urrea, who uses, it turns out, a whole lot of exclamation marks. As someone who only uses exclamation marks for sarcasm, it was a difficult edit. And at Star-Crossed, Kevin Frazier boldly brings new life to the conversations about Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson, and the whole essay is a treat. That sentence ended with a period, so you know it's sincere.

Apparently there is some sort of controversy, a lot of hoohah over nothing, about publishers feeling a little grumpy about sending endless copies of review books to bloggers. William Morrow sent out a notice to bloggers about a new review book policy. (I got that email. I did not in any way interpret it the way some people seemed to, but whatever.)

But GOD. Remember the days (before electricity was invented, natch) when a) we had to FAX book review requests? and b) when no one wanted to send bloggers books? I sent one fax a week to Random House for a year before they broke down and started sending me books. So all you damn youngsters, you have no idea how good you have it.

(Someone described me on a website as "one of the oldest of the bloggers" and YES. Thank you. Basically near death over here, but my new hip replacement is working out just fine.)

December 2, 2011

We're working on the new issue, up on Monday, so we don't have much for you today. Perhaps you can go register to win a copy of Dubravka Ugresic's Karaoke Culture? Or you can do some daytime drinking at your desk and watch kitten videos for a couple hours. No reason you can't do both.

December 1, 2011

André Schiffrin, the man who published "Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Noam Chomsky, Günter Grass, Art Spiegelman, Marguerite Duras and Gunnar Myrdal," talks about the role of money in publishing in a totally cheery and upbeat manner.

When I came out of the Delhi airport, the first bookstore I saw had a whole rack of books labelled Hachette… And Hachette belongs to the leading French manufacturer of armaments, Lagardère. So you ask yourself, would Hachette in India ever publish a book on military spending in India when they are selling their aircraft to the Indian Air Force? I doubt it.

The critically acclaimed and award-winning author of such works as "Divided Heaven", "Cassandra" and "The Quest For Christa T." courted controversy throughout her career and had links to the hated East German Stasi police in the 1960s.

Maureen McHugh's After the Apocalypse is one of the better short story collections I have read in a while. (Her Mothers and Other Monsters was a favorite when it was released, too.) In her new book, there might be zombie penal colonies, and environmental devastation, and a corporate takeover, but you still have to pay your property taxes somehow. It's a delight.

I live in LA. Right now. And on and off, I’m confronted with all sorts of LA stuff. And a few years ago, one of the big LA things was people like Shirley MacLaine, who thought they were reincarnated. And people who think they are reincarnated are always convinced that they were Napoleon, or…

Cleopatra.

Cleopatra. Yeah. I’m pretty sure that if I’m reincarnated, that I come from life after life of ‘peasant’. And After the Apocalypse—all of my apocalyptic stories are not of the people who become Mad Max, but they’re of the rest of us, you know. So, yeah. Things tend not to go really well for my people after the apocalypse.

I almost didn't link to this, because it seems like enabling in some way, but Quentin Rowan the Plagiarist confesses to his misdeeds at the Fix, connecting them to his alcoholism. The reason I'm linking is because Rex Pickett, author of Sideways, has an appropriately flabbergasted response to Quentin's confession. The parallels to James Frey's confession -- another addict -- are interesting, and if you know alcoholics -- and I have known alcoholics -- then it is all very recognizable. The apology that is never really an apology, the "hey other people think I am swell," the collecting his punishments around him as an act of grand egoism... From Pickett's response:

What I find so weird about his "confession" is that in order to atone for his "literary" sins, Rowan, in apparent desperation at the scorn he feels is going to storm down on him, grasps onto his plagiarism as an addiction, then cleaves to AA, as if those who have had real addiction problems -- the physical and emotional suffering that drugs and alcohol inflict on a person -- have to be lumped together with this charlatan. I mean, where does it end? Can a serial murderer now claim he was addicted to torturing and raping and dismembering young prostitutes and hope to find redemption in a 12-step program? Okay, that's hyperbole, but where is the line drawn, this naming your "crime" an addiction?